Spyglass Field Recordings: Ghost Ranch

Pohio's practice is interested in the construction of imagery, in what we might call the artifice of image making. He utilises techniques that have been typically used to create a notion of the real, such as the film still and the lenticular photograph. With this appropriation of the aesthetic of cinematic imagery, he is able to very elegantly blur distinctions between the 'real' and the 'constructed'.

Pohio creates new narratives from simple found imagery. Stills are displaced from moving sequences - the cowboy dozing in a train, his dark silhouette right of centre suggesting a splice from cinema. Images are imbued with a sense of history, evoking a feeling of nostalgia and the ability to look backwards into a recollection from the past. Technically then, Pohio’s process allows him to present the past as richly present. Nostalgia is accompanied by a sense of loss, with an image's movement frozen by its captured stillness. A photograph of a kitsch lenticular print of a “man of war” ship suggests movement in soft and grainy fashion; a still from an old a black and white film becomes the fantastic Isle of Friendship; and the intoxicating stillness of the pond at Otahuna is almost overloaded with textures of green foliage and detail. The flipping and mirroring of image in Otahuna Love letter II, is typical of Pohio's toying with the mechanics of vision. In looking at a Nathan Pohio, we are always reminded of the pleasures and gentle rigors that enhance our vision.